Tea-Totally
by Sally Mn
Summary: Blair is sick, and Jim is making tea. That's all...


**Tea-Totally**

 _Jjjjjjjiiiiiimmmmm..._

You may be Sentinel of the Great City, but sometimes you do have to wonder if the super-sensitive hearing that has your resident little mad scientist so happy extends to hearing _thoughts_ as well as anything said in a radius of tohellandthensome miles (your little mad scientist could - and given all the tests, damn well _should_ \- tell you the exact figure normally, but not today).

Certainly - and without any trouble at all - you can sense the rolled eyes and hear the huff of frustration, even though Sandburg is a couple of rooms away. And, if he knows what was good for him, still in bed.

...Yeah, riiiight. lj-cut

Since when does Sandburg know what was good for him? You ignore that question - you've learned the answer the hard way and all too long ago - and concentrate on trying to work out how to make this native Patagonian healing tea that you're insisting your roommate should drink before he goes back to sleep. Turnabout being fair play and all that, and you have vivid memories of the times _you've_ been faced with a dose of one or another of Sandburg's 'miracle natural cures' and a whammy of big worried blue eyes that pretty much _forced_ you to swallow it down.

(The fact that you have equally vivid memories of how said eyes turned gleefully inquisitive the _minute_ you were up to being asked _how_ said dose had affected your senses _and_ of the interrogation and plans for repeat doses to check the results... well, it never seems to stop you caving in the next time. Funny that.)

Anyway, Blair is the one who had brought this stuff into your nice orderly life and nice orderly home, and Blair was the one who keeps insisting it all works. Blair can damn well swallow his words or his tea, his choice.

After all, he wouldn't even _need_ any sort of cure if his latest insane anthropological study hadn't involved spending day after day - in the worst weather for _years_ \- taping the daily natural sounds at some of the more infamous crime scenes in Cascade. Something to do with the influence of sound and senses and atmosphere on serial crime and criminals, and you weren't surprised when you noticed a decayed warehouse and close-by duckpond of death ("this is for _science,_ man!") on the list he was trying to hide from your eagle eyes.

You had promptly and flatly forbidden it.

Simon, as Captain of Major Crimes, had flatly forbidden it.

Blair hadn't taken it well from either of you, and had given you the silent treatment for oh, at least seven _hours_ (a record!) before cracking; the flood of protests, complaints, reasons, arguments, grumbling and so on and _so_ on, was almost as irritating as the silence had been.

And then - being Sandburg - he'd gone anyway.

And - being Sandburg and not precisely stupid - he hadn't actually _told_ his Sentinel before he went. It wasn't till late in the day that you tried to contact him... and worked it out in three and a half minutes flat. You can't say - you aren't admitting even to yourself - what you thought might happen in that warehouse (not even _Sandburg_ could get kidnapped and nearly murdered in the same spot twice in one lifetime and crap, you remember wishing at the time that you hadn't thought of that because this was _Sandburg_ after all!) but you damn well knew that it was just asking for trouble... which okay, you hadn't got.

That isn't the point.

Nor is it the point that you _and_ Simon _and_ the rest of Major Crimes who you dragged into the hunt uncovered a previously unknown dope-hidden-in-violin-cases smuggling ring hiding out in the old warehouses, arrested three demented would-be grunge warlocks (the warlocking wasn't the problem, the noise they made with their grunge-punk-heavymetal magic incantations was), solved one of Vice's most annoying cold cases (the details of which you really _really_ didn't want to know about) and rescued a... well, a duck (with an injured wing, okay?) from the duckpond of death.

All in a day's work, no trouble at all. And _not_ the point.

The point is... whatever. Sandburg was just asking for it. So when three days later he developed the mother of all head colds, you thought it pretty damn well deserved and were going to let the guy deal with it on his own, take his (what was the word he always uses? - oh yeah, _karmic_ ) punishment like a man and learn a damn lesson about consequences. Tough love and all that. No sympathy, no coddling, no worrying and Blessed Protecting this time.

You pause in the tea-making, and stretch out your senses for the ninth time, checking that Blair wasn't too warm, that his breathing was easier, that the lungs and throat were fine, that his...

And mentally slap yourself.

So okay, you'll get the hang of this tough love thing another time.

Meanwhile, you have a Patagonian healing tea to make.

You cautiously sniff the Patagonian healing... mulch, and sneeze. Oh it's _natural_ all right, brings back memories of the jungle; the leaves, the bark, the smell of something warm and damp, and yeah you would swear some of the earth as well is in there too. What there isn't is any instructions, and while you _could_ ask Sandburg to write them down for you ... that would just result in an eye-rolling more eloquent than a thousand words, several attempts to get up to make the damn stuff himself, even more attempts to run off at the mouth with no voice to speak of, and a page or more of the chicken scratches the guy calls handwriting, with waaayyy more than you need, want, or think you can _stand_ to know about the ingredients of Blair's personal and extremely scary 'medicine cupboard'.

You can do this. Just put mulch in mug, add water, make tea. How hard can it be?

 **~oOo~**

Sooooo... okay, _that_ hard.

That is, that hard if the smell is anything to go by: not so much jungle mulch any more but _graveyard_ mulch, with more than a bit of the grave occupants through in. You squint at the package again, then at the box it came in, to see if it mentions anything about the ingredients being illegal, immoral, inconceivably awful or just plain fatal.

But of course it doesn't, because Sandburg had worked out a long time ago that he has _much_ lower odds of getting any of these 'test' mixtures down his hapless Sentinel's throat if said Sentinel has the slightest chance of actually finding out _what_ is in them. Labels tend to come off and get well and truly lost before there is any chance that you'll be able to use super-or-otherwise vision on them.

So. Patagonian healing... not-so-much-tea-as-liquefied-crap. You spend ten minutes locating where he put the strainer the last time he used it (Sandburg is something of a mini-tornado in the kitchen, you've found - great food, but does he have to use every damn utensil in the place even for a salad?) because god forbid these oh-so-super senses you've been landed in are good for anything _useful_ like that. Once found, it isn't _that_ good at straining the cooling crap, but you figure if there's still bits of the stuff in Sandburg's tea, they're probably healthy too, so he can just swallow them down. His throat's not _that_ sore.

Tough love, remember?

You reach out with your hearing, check how harsh his breathing is, and strain the crap again, and again, and check it minutely for... stuff. Then pour it into a pan to heat, because it's not actually cold but you've had to drink lukewarm not-actually-Patagonian-but-somewhere-just-as-bad tea (Sandburg looked at you with those eyes, remember? - and you've tried, but _your_ worried look doesn't have anywhere near the same effect on him. Life's a bitch that way). Tough love shouldn't be _that_ cruel, even at its toughest.

You'll probably throw the pan out, and the strainer, and the mug too (and damn it, it's one of _yours,_ and you can't even blame Sandburg because who was the one who grabbed it from the shelf? You don't answer yourself on that). It'll be worth it if Sandburg doesn't like the taste of his own medicine and agrees to get the standard over-the-counter stuff next time, like normal folk do.

(At least, standard over-the-counter stuff that doesn't do weird and not wonderful things to a Sentinel. The last patent cold mixture he tried on you made you hear colors for three days, remember? That's why anything purple is _still_ banned from the loft.)

Anyway, the tea is hot again, smells just as bad... and sharp. Sharp is bad, sharp will still hurt. You mentally add honey to it, and your super-sensitive nose tells your not-so-sensitive brain _just_ what it thinks that will be like. _Arrrrrrggh_ , that's what.

You mentally add sugar. That's a worse _arrrrrrggh._

You open a cupboard and stare at the small but daunting selection of Sandburg's 'natural sweeteners'. You try to remember if he ever fed them to you in one of his beloved sense tests, or snuck them into your coffee instead of the "white poison, man, sweet cyanide, killer crystals, ultra-refined evil, two spoonfuls of death per cup" (his words, you always thought sugar was a perfectly satisfactory name), and what the hell he told you 'jaggary' or 'stevia' were and why the hell you agreed to let him bring them into your nice safe-for-killer-crystals home...?

You read the labels (not torn off, which means he doesn't think you'll ever read them). Big mistake.

You open one at random and sniff it. Bigger mistake, the cloying syrupy sweetness nearly gives you a sugar high all on its own, and reminds you that _that_ is pretty much exactly what happened when he did the last lot of tests on you. So _that_ was what he put in them. The sneaky little...

You then hear the harsh, deep cough Sandburg is trying to smother in his room. Why he bothers to try, you don't know, _he's_ the one who worked out the distance you can hear a mouse fart from and he should _know_ you can hear - and pinpoint - _any_ sound that means he's in pain from a distance. You found out just _how_ far a distance in that same damn warehouse.

When you manage to forcibly stop yourself from thinking about _that_ , you realize that you're holding one of the bottles of... something or other sweetener in one clenched fist, and while you don't _think_ you can break it by sheer force of remembered anger, if you do, and you get blood in the Patagonian tea... you'll have to start all over again.

Enough with the bad memories, Ellison. This time he went there his damn _self_ , and he's only paying for it with a head cold, and it's entirely his own fault.

You pour a decent helping of the something or other sweetener into the tea, wincing at the way it doesn't help the smell. You may have overdone it too... but what the hell, it's not like you can take it out again. Sandburg will just have to suck it up... or drink it up.

Good thing he _has_ lost his voice or you know you'd be hearing _all_ about it before he did. Not so good thing that he can still _think_ them at you and you still haven't quiteruled out being able at times to hear someone at the top of their _mental_ voice. And the top of Sandburg's mental voice would be...

You shudder at the idea, stir the tea, and pour in a bit more of the sweetener for good... luck, then take a deep breath, gather up your courage, patience and willpower (because you know from looooooong experience that you need all three to deal with him when he's sick, and yeah, he's mentioned the need for them when _you_ are, but that's beside the point okay?) and head for his bedroom, steaming mug in hand while you prepare your case, that is all cribbed straight from Sandburg's Guide to Natural Healing (two millionth edition if anyone's counting and no, you really weren't) and _nothing_ to do with getting even, nothing at all.

At his door, you reach out and check again, because tough love needs to know how tough to be, right? And to know that, you need to check how he is. Again.

So coughing... stopped, that's good. Breathing, still harsh and snuffling but deeper. Even from here you can feel the heat of a slight fever and though the light is dimmed, see a flush on his face and the way he's thrown the blanket off _again_...

And he snores slightly, a small, snuffling sound.

He's asleep.

You've spent all that time making this damn miracle tea, and while you dithered over strainers and sweeteners, he's damn well gone back to sleep before you can make him drink it.

For a moment, you try to calculate (you're a cop, scenarios are your thing, remember?) the pros and cons of making him wake up and drink the damn crappy mix, just because he always _always_ makes you take it (so okay, maybe not if _you're_ asleep first, because if you are you're obviously not gonna remember and you don't feel like allowing any alibis here). Pros - taste of his own medicine, he's the one who insists it works so he'll feel better for it, he wouldn't want to waste it, you'll be able to remind him next time if there is a next time, if it's as bad as you know it is there won't _be_ a next time, and damn it, if it works he'll feel better so _you_ can too... and it's still about tough love and all that.

Cons - oh fuck it, who _cares_? You can be tough another time. Maybe. If you have to.

You put the mug down by his bedside, and slip out silently, thinking you need a taste of _your_ brand of own medicine before doing it all again (and you will, you probably will).

It's _not_ too early for a totally-non-Patagonian-and-unsweetened beer or three, is it?

 **-the end-**


End file.
